I haven't had the problems you discuss. It's been about a year since I used MAME, but I was once a regular user. I kept a "complete" set until they started adding the CHD games, then I saw how pointless it was and only kept the games I enjoyed.

You don't need to constantly update MAME. So that should eliminate some of your problems.

It also sounds like your source for ROMs is pretty crappy. As I said, it's been a while, but I used usenet to get mine. Or a bittorrent package, properly labelled with its version.

As for needing to configure every game, this is not true in my experience. There is a global configuration, which can be accessed while in-game. It was rare that I had to tinker with the settings. Usually it would be for games with non-standard layouts like Mortal Kombat.

The official distribution is only 11MB in size. I seem to recall that they once used a compression method on the official binaries, so maybe a personally compiled binary would be 40MB.